These days one comes across many people who are thoroughly confused by the repeat election of Donald Trump. Shaking their heads in bewilderment, they just cannot understand how such a politically heterodox figure could rise so high.
To understand the seemingly mind-boggling ascension of Trump, we must first understand the larger societal dynamic that brought him to power.
To start with, we need to recognize the obvious fact that the American system of governance has largely broken down. This holds true for practically every sphere of this country’s public life: the federal government, financial system, healthcare, justice system, immigration, education, defense, law enforcement, etc. The institutions that were designed to facilitate societal intercourse and enhance the well-being of American citizens have not only become inefficient, but they outright harm the very people they are supposed to help.
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To give some examples, consider our healthcare system. Even though the U.S. government spends far more than any other nation on healthcare, Americans are among the sickest people of any Western country and have the lowest life expectancy among the developed nations. Steering people toward heavy use of questionable medicaments – rather than encouraging much – needed lifestyle modifications – America’s medical establishment fills people’s bodies with cocktails of chemical compounds that carry a range of risks and side effects. Exacerbating rather than intelligently addressing widespread chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, the U.S. Healthcare system literally makes Americans sicker and shortens their lifespan. In addition to this obviously wrongheaded approach, America’s medical facilities are literally unsafe. According to one study by Johns Hopkins University “over 250,000 people in the U.S. die each year because of medical errors, making it the third leading cause of death in this country behind heart disease and cancer.”
The matters are similarly dire within the U.S. financial system. Even though the U.S. is said to be the richest country in the world, our government has managed to run up the largest public debt in the annals of man. At an astounding thirty-six trillion dollars, it stands at 123 percent of the GDP and places a burden of over 105,000 on every single American citizen. Worse yet, now we add a trillion dollars’ worth of new debt every few months. Bad as this is, we are not even counting the government’s unfunded liabilities, which run well north of two hundred trillion dollars. The net result of this gross mismanagement is the steady decline of the dollar’s purchasing power and falling real wages, which make it increasingly difficult for regular people to make ends meet.
It should be obvious to every sober observer that the American government will not be able to make good on its financial obligations. With our fiscal house in disarray, America is bankrupt, and its financial system subsists on borrowed time: it has not yet collapsed only because of the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. It is, however, only a matter of time before the whole house of financial cards comes crashing down.
Moving on, our government spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined. Originally tasked with protecting the American people from outside enemies, our military establishment has instead been launching one disastrous foreign war after another at great cost in blood and treasure. And we are not even talking about the millions who have died in the war zones whose flames America’s military-industrial complex ignited and fanned. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine – we have sown mayhem and destruction around the globe. Because of its aggressive militarism, America is bitterly hated in too many places around the planet, which has made its citizens vulnerable to attacks both at home and abroad.
And what about our education system? According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 84 percent of black students are not proficient in mathematics and 85 percent of black students lack basic reading skills. To express it conversely, a mere 16 percent of black children are proficient in math and 15 percent in reading. These are truly astonishing figures that are indicative of the colossal failure of our educational institutions. But the depth of this failure becomes even more breathtaking in light of the fact that the government spends nearly twenty thousand dollars a year per pupil. This is a mind-boggling waste of money and human promise, as it is obvious that most of these children will never be able to live up fully to their God-given potential.
As far as our representative federal government is concerned, we regularly hold elections and send our representatives to Washington to act on our behalf. However, many of them quickly become ensnared by special interests such as pharmaceutical companies, multinational corporate conglomerates, and the military-industrial complex. Thus, instead of pursuing programs that would benefit their constituents, they end up pushing agendas that are antithetical to the interests of their voters such as open borders and forever wars in lands most Americans could not even locate on the map.
We could go on and on down the list of institutional failure. Suffice to say, almost every major American institution today is broken and malfunctioning. What we are facing is a multifaced institutional crisis that affects every aspect of America’s life.
It is imperative, however, that we identify the true cause of the problem. The malfunction of our institutions is not due merely to their ineptness or wastefulness (although they are certainly plagued by these). Their failure is primarily a result of systemic, deep-seated corruption: instead of serving the interests of the American people, the implicit goal of nearly every American institution today is the advancement and enrichment of their personnel in conjunction with their favored special interests with whom they co-exist in a web of symbiotic, mutually beneficial financial relationships.
The Covid vaccination scheme is the perfect illustration. In its initial stages – under the guise of public need – America’s public health officials oversaw the transfer of billions of dollars of public money to private enterprises like Pfizer and Moderna to “assist” them in developing vaccines against Sars-COV-2. They claimed it was in the public interest to support these corporations with our tax dollars. Once the so-called vaccines were developed, the health establishment launched a massive multi-billion-dollar campaign (again financed by tax money) to advertise these products to the public. The profits from the administration of these products would, of course, be kept by Pfizer, Moderna, and the like. When large swathes of the population showed reluctance to submit themselves to the experimental mRNA injectables, America’s health officials relentlessly advocated for mandates on the hesitant population to force the injections into their bodies. At the same time, officials at America’s health institutions did everything they could to cover up the ineffectiveness and unsafeness of these products.
Each shot was charged for and paid with taxpayer money and the profits kept by those responsible for the scheme. The result was an unprecedented financial bonanza for the corporations and their enablers inside the public health institutions. Pfizer and Moderna made off with fabulous profits while Dr. Fauci and his comrades received, among other benefits, hundreds of millions of dollars of the royalties from the faulty products they helped to force upon the population by deception and outright compulsion. A number of these high healthcare officials now sit on the boards of the vaccine makers, receiving millions of dollars in return for their good service while in charge of America’s public institutions during the manufactured crisis. And let’s not forget the handsome salaries and extensive perks that those staffing those institutions receive from the money extracted via taxation from the working people of this land. Dr. Anthony Fauci, for one, was the highest-paid government servant in America.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the population did not fare well during Covid. Impoverished and devasted by the unnecessary lockdowns advocated by the very institutions and officials responsible for the crisis in the first place, they were injected with ineffective and dangerous vaccines that did nothing to prevent transmission. In fact, those who have received the Covid vaccines were more likely to fall ill with Covid and countless individuals have suffered grave side effects including heart damage, stroke, and death. To make matters worse, those who tried to speak the truth were labelled conspiracy theorists and misinformation spreaders and were heavily censored, cancelled, and otherwise penalized. Many honest doctors and scientists lost their jobs and professional certifications when trying to point out the obvious fraud at the heart of the vaccination scheme.
The Covid vaccine scheme stands as the perfect illustration of the kind of deep-seated corruption that pervades America’s institutional framework.
The dynamic of the institutional corruption that became so glaringly obvious in the wake of the vaccine debacle is to one degree or another at play across all American institutions today: from healthcare through finance to education.
The institutionalists and their favored interests enrich themselves directly through tax funds and by creating an environment through rules and regulations that enables those interests to profit unscrupulously on the back of the general population. Part of these ill-gotten gains is then circulated back to the institutional players through a wide array of payback channels. Pfizer Foundation, for example, gives out an array of grants and donations to various institutions within the healthcare establishment.
The fruit of this widespread corruption is manifestly visible across American society: The people who run and oversee these institutions and those whose interests they favor live in comparative ease and abundance while the mass of the populace suffers hardship and depredation.
And it is precisely this dynamic that has brought Donald Trump to power. This dynamic was succinctly encapsulated during his first presidential campaign in his pledge to “drain the Swamp.” The Swamp, of course, stands for the deep-seated corruption that pervades American institutions, most of which is facilitated, in one way or another, by the federal government. It turned out the Swamp proved too much for Trump in his first attempt, even as he now readies himself for round two.
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Donald Trump is a populist who represents the downtrodden and maltreated masses that have been taken advantage of and harmed by the entrenched corruption throughout America’s institutions. He gives voice and political expression to the pain and frustration of the common people who feel they’ve been exploited, censored, cancelled, and lied to by the failing institutions controlled by the self-interested, avaricious, and contempt-full elites and their favored special interests. In the eyes of most ordinary Americans, the list of these institutions runs wide and long and includes everything from Wall Street through the DOJ, FBI, and the FDA to the Pentagon, and much else in between.
Donald Trump is the first truly major populist leader of the last eighty years. He rose to power, because the institutional system of American governance – the Establishment – has become too brazen in preying on and abusing the bulk of the American people. Donald Trump has become their flag-bearer, their champion, and their hope.
It is this dynamic that accounts for his spectacular rise in 2016 and his even more spectacular comeback in 2024.
If we wish to understand the political phenomenon of Donald Trump and his ostensibly mind-boggling rise to power, we need to grasp this dynamic.
Once we comprehend it, much of what is happening in the political arena today will make good sense.
